START

As a founder, Emma Lawler felt like SOC 2 was a major distraction from building.

But when she started to selling to enterprise logos, it became something that was impossible to ignore.

Now, as Product Lead at Rippling, she channeled her first-hand experience of getting SOC 2 compliant to rethink how all automated compliance frameworks are run. 

It started with a retro. 

Every other SOC 2 vendor works the same way: 

Detect a problem
Alert your team
Fix it...somewhere else

The problem with this checklist is that "som...

96% of users aren't saying no to your product.
They're saying no to your paywall.

And the only tool most teams have for that is manual A/B tests.

Thousands of dollars per experiment. Weeks to trust one result. One variable at a time. Every test starts from zero.

Stop guessing. Start compounding.

Tranzmit AI builds, tests, and evolves paywalls instead.

Analyze the behavioral data, generate variants, score them against simulation and conversion history, ship the winner with guardrails and auto-rollback.

50x faster than manual A/B.<...

Right now most AI agents interact with software the way humans do

They open a browser, look at a screenshot, and try to figure out what to click

That's like ripping the LIDAR off a Waymo and handing it a camera

Tarun & Alex kept running into this problem. 

They were building an AI receptionist for dentists, and at conference after conference people asked the same thing: do you integrate with X or Y platform?

Seven other people were doing the same thing. None of them could integrate. Alex and T...

Before AI, marketing teams built five creatives for every campaign.

Now they can generate fifty.

But more content didn't solve marketing.

It exposed a new bottleneck.

Most of it is slop.

AI solved the quantity problem.

It created a quality problem.

Kyle Wong and co-founder Colin Tseung built InstaAgent to solve the second one.

A consumer brand hands InstaAgent a single marketing brief. From there, the team handles the strategy, the creative, the distribution, and the analytics.

The result isn't 50 generic...

1.2 billion people struggle with addiction.
There will never be enough clinicians to treat them.

Koby Conrad believes AI changes that equation.

His own story starts much smaller.
High 24/7 from 19 to 24.
He got sober.
Taught himself to code.
Built a side project called Sunflower.

Years later, that side project became a VC-backed company with a much bigger ambition.

Today, Sunflower has:
→ 500,000+ users and counting
→ Grown from 200 to 100,000 monthly active users in under 6 months
→ Reached a $1M run rate in about 10 months
→ Tracked 109 years of sobri...

Bao's job was automating other people's jobs.

So he automated his own.

His team used to forward deploy the old way — go into customers' offices, sit next to their teams, watch how the work actually got done, then build the automations by hand.

Then they asked the obvious question: why are humans doing all of this?

Now Hessian's AI agents construct a digital twin of your business, map your back-office workflows, and take the work over end-to-end — plugging into whatever you already use.

Slack. HubSpot. Salesforce.

No new...

Most founders don't need another lawyer.

They need a better system.

Jessica Hubley spent years in Big Law, served as General Counsel at a venture-backed startup, and built her own practice serving startup founders.

She kept seeing the same problem.

Not that founders lacked intelligence.

They lacked exposure to the legal playbook.

They didn't know what kind of lawyer they needed.
Or what needed to happen next.

So she built Story.

"Story.law is your expert General Counsel - fear no legal!"<...

10 coding agents running in parallel.

Zero idea which one finished.

That was the problem.

Around November, Austin Wang and his co-founder Lawrence Chen stopped opening their IDE.

They weren't writing code by hand anymore

Everything ran through Claude Code and Codex in the terminal

10 panes. 10 agents. 10 copies of the repo.

And two problems appeared almost immediately.

They couldn't tell what each agent...

Most companies don't need smarter AI. They need AI they can actually deploy

OpenClaw is brilliant but can be brutal to set up. Days of configs. 

Agents messaging random contacts on WhatsApp...

Tensol: one click. Five minutes. Each AI employee runs 24/7 in its own isolated VM with full company context

Connect Slack, GitHub, Sentry, HubSpot, Gmail. Every action logged. Enterprise-grade security built in

When we recorded this ep: ~100 AI employees running. 300K+ Twitter views

Most companies think they have a documentation problem.

They don't.

They have a context problem.

Every company runs on things that were never written down - they just live in people's heads.

That's the insight that led Max Arnold and his co-founders Leon Iwanowitsch & David Korn to start Ontora (YC P26).

Because AI agents can only be as useful as the context they're given.

And most organizations have never...

Every company runs on a hidden workforce.

The people who reset the passwords. Clear the MFA requests. Provision the access. Push the tickets through the systems so the rest of the company can work.

Seb Poole wants to give that work to agents.

Not a better way to track the request. A workforce that completes it.

He's seen the problem from the inside.

His last company, Frankie Health, was acquired by Unmind - a leading workplace mental health provider whose customers include Disney and Uber.

At every...

The biggest hedge funds have entire teams building AI. Most asset managers are on their own.

But closing that gap isn't about buying more AI. It's about a problem most people get wrong.

You can test code by running it.
You can't test an investment by buying it.

Software engineering and investing aren't the same problem

In software, we've moved from autocomplete to agents to long-running agent swarms - each step climbing another level of abstraction

In investing, human judgment still has to exist at the object level<...

Shipping isn't the bottleneck anymore. Attention is.

Maanav Agrawal kept seeing the same pattern.

Some of the coolest products weren't getting the attention they deserved

Meanwhile, companies that consistently shared what they were building were generating inbound

He'd lived it himself
He saw it in other industries like real estate
He saw it across his YC batch and among founders generally

The problem wasn't always the product.

It was making sure people knew the product existed.

So he and Co-Founder Jason Zhan built...

In 2022, San Francisco leased five million square feet of office space

The entire year

In Q1 2026 alone: more than four million

At the time of this recording (Apr 2026) tenant demand reached 7.5 million square feet

The highest ever recorded.

OpenAI has accumulated nearly a million square feet in Mission Bay

Coinbase, Nvidia, and the Warriors all landed at Mission Rock (It's effectively full - premium space there is almost impossible to get)

Reuben Torenberg has brokered SF startup office deals through every major cycle since 2016

A single glass of water holds about 20 hours of breathing

Leo Kankkunen is building the gear that pulls it out

Tankless diving technology that generates breathable oxygen directly from water. 

It sounds impossible at first. Then you hear the physics...

Then you realize the implications stretch far past diving

Water is hydrogen and oxygen. Apply a DC current, swing away the electrons binding them, and you get the purest form of breathable gas.

Startups spend more time wiring their outbound tools together than actually talking to potential customers

Verbiflow was built to change that

It's Outbound Infrastructure for growth teams

Outbound used to be a stack

One tool for email.

Another for LinkedIn.

Something else for cold calls.

Verbiflow is the system that runs your outbound, all in one place

Run sequences through email, LinkedIn, and cold calls

Handles sending

Manages replies

Runs follow-ups

Keeps it all in...

Most brands don't know if their marketing is working.

They launch campaigns. Spend real money. Watch the dashboards. Then hope.

Months later, a report arrives explaining what happened. 

The campaign is over. 
The budget is gone.
The market has already moved.

That's how brand tracking has worked for years.

Henk and Harry are repeat founders with exits behind them - two decades building brand trackers for the world's largest brands on one side, a startup built and sold plus a market research career on the other. They'd wa...

The internet got flooded with AI content.

Everything started sounding the same.

Same hooks.
Same cadence.
Same “we’re not doing X — we’re doing Y.”

Jameson Zaballos thinks that’s exactly why human taste matters more now.

Napa is the team behind those viral startup memes you’ve probably already seen.

But underneath the memes is a bigger thesis:
The future of founder marketing belongs to people who still sound human.

Not polished.
Not optimized.

Human.

AI can generate infin...

Global markets were built for everyone. 
Access wasn't.

Millions of traders outside the US watch Tesla move. Watch Nvidia earnings.
Watch SpaceX rumors explode timelines.

But when it's time to act? The door closes.

Mochatrade is rebuilding that layer.
A perpetual futures platform for US equities. Built for global traders first.

Trade TSLA, NVDA, AAPL, and 50+ US stocks

Up to 50x leverage
24/7 markets
No US brokerage account required

Deposit in local currency. 
Trade in minutes. 
Stay self-custodial the entire tim...

The best AI companies aren't replacing bad software. They're giving it a login.

Every software company for years has made the same pitch to manufacturers: clean APIs, migrate your stack, rip out your ERP.

It never works. 

The ERP is the company brain. Years of data. 

You can't rip it out any more than you can rip out someone's memory.

Nikolas Keller & Co-Founder Lukas Postulka figured out the obvious thing that everyone missed

Stop trying to replace the software. 

Give an AI employee a login ins...

Relationships drive revenue.

That's why more companies are investing in dinners, customer events, founder meetups, and community gatherings.

But here's what happens after the event:

You sourced the attendees

You sent the invites

You hosted the event

Then everyone goes home

Now you're digging through Slack messages, WhatsApp chats, notes apps, spreadsheets, and email threads trying to remember:

Who showed up.

Who you talked to.

Chris Bakke never pitched Elon. He just posted good ideas in public for nine months straight.

Laskie was sourcing engineers on Twitter while everyone else lived on LinkedIn.

Along the way Chris started tweeting his own takes on how Twitter should fix recruiting.

Not as a pitch - just because he had strong opinions about what was broken.

Elon liked one. Then followed him. For the next nine months Chris kept the takes sharp on purpose, knowing exactly who was watching.

Then the DM came. A phone number and...

Teddy li's first version of Prepse did something reasonable

It connected to your call recordings, pulled out the data, and filled in your CRM. customers told him it was a nice add-on. he could have explained why they were wrong. he chose to find out why they were right.

So he looked closer, and what the most interested customers actually wanted was underneath it.

They didn't just want cleaner data. they wanted to use it to improve how their teams sold, to make their median reps perform like their top ones.

...

AI shouldn't replace therapists.
It should help them spend more time being therapists.

Not because AI won't get smarter

Because good therapy isn't just information
It's trust
It's compassion

It's the human element.

Most therapists spend only about half their time doing therapy

The other half?

Running the business

Notes. Paperwork. Marketing. Insurance claims.

Klarify automates the work around the session so therapists can focus on the work only they can do

Today, more than 7,000 therapists use the...

Most companies don't realize they have a documentation problem until everyone already depends on it.

Customers use it. New hires use it. Engineers use it.

And when documentation falls out of date, the whole system starts working against itself

People stop trusting what they're reading

Teams lose context

And nobody can fix it, because the problem is everywhere at once

The longer it goes unfixed, the harder it is to untangle

That's...

A production issue shouldn't require a detective
Yet that's how most observability works today

Most observability tools just dump alerts. Duplicates, no context, and you still fix it yourself

Nicolò Magnante  and his cofounder Arseniy Shishaev - who spent years building part of Datadog's metrics product - think that's backwards

So they built Superlog. Observability that's meant never to be opened.

A wizard scans your repo, installs proper OpenTelemetry, and runs daily to keep up as you ship

When something breaks, it groups the errors into one incident, in...

AI agents can write code, analyze data, and pass the bar exam

They can't order you a pizza because they don't have a phone number

Think about how much of the real world still runs on phone numbers

SMS verification

Delivery coordination

Account creation

Calling a business...

Without one, an agent is stuck behind glass

Manav Modi & cofounder Meet Modi built AgentPhone to fix that

<...

Flowscope’s agents can map an entire department in two weeks.

Then they automate it.

It’s an AI-native consulting firm where agents learn how a business actually runs - process by process - then automate the most manual work directly inside the company’s existing systems

Not in quarters. In days.

Samuel kept seeing the same pattern every time a consulting firm walked into a large organization:

Great strategy
Beautiful slides
Minimal implementation

The recommendations were smart. The operational change rarely came.<...

99% of session replays are your app working exactly as expected (hopefully)

The other 1% is where the friction hides

The bugs.
The failed onboarding flows.
The conversion leaks.

No team has time to watch them all.

That's the problem Michael Egan and his co-founder kept hitting at their last company. They had analytics. They had session replays. They had ideas to improve conversion.

The small fixes always lost to bigger priorities..

So they pivoted and built CodeCanary: An AI product engineer that...

Most cancer drugs target proteins

FinalDose thinks the real opportunity is one layer deeper: DNA

Jeff Liu and his team are building a programmable drug platform that uses genetic mutations to identify and selectively destroy cancer cells

Cells without those mutations are not targeted

Instead of creating a completely new drug for every cancer type, the platform is designed as a reusable system with different genetic instructions

One chassis.
Different disease targets.

The broader bet: DNA is more deterministic than proteins, which could unlock...

The next big space race won’t be about going up.

It’ll be about bringing things back down.

After four years building satellites at Astranis, Payton Case realized something: as launch costs collapse, the bottleneck flips.

There’s still no infrastructure for manufacturing products in space and returning them safely to Earth.

So Dispatch is building it.

The thesis is simple: gravity is an invisible constraint on manufacturing.

Remove gravity and semiconductor defects drop. Pharmaceutical crystals become more stable. Biological structures that collapse on Earth can solidi...

Ansel Dias is using his robot factory to build more robot factories

AutoFAB is a robotic desktop factory that prints, assembles, quality-checks, and packages hardware autonomously

It’s already being used to manufacture more of its own robotic arms

The insight behind it is simple: Prototyping is easy

Production is the completely different ballgame - and that’s where hardware startups die

Factories. QA. Packaging. Scaling production.

That’s the bottleneck AutoFAB wants to eliminate

The long-term vision: AutoFABs making more AutoFABs

<...

The most valuable thing in AI won't be generating answers.

It'll be knowing which ones are right.

Right now AI writes code, solves problems, produces proofs. But there's no way to guarantee any of it is correct. Pedro Nobre is building that guarantee.

Cajal sits at the intersection of formal verification and AI. They use Lean, a language that lets you formalize a statement and derive a proof that's either correct or incorrect. 

Binary. No ambiguity.

The hard part: the space of possible proofs is c...

A bug shows up in your product 

Lucent spots it 

Drops an alert in Slack

Someone tags a coding agent in the thread 

It ships a PR

Fixed before anyone knew it was broken

This is the workflow Lucent users are actually running today

Lucent watches your session replays like a human analyst: friction points, bugs, failed upgrades...

Patterns no human has time to sit through

C...

The entire vibe coding wave got one thing backwards

Everyone optimized for speed

Prompt in, app out, as fast as possible

But the bottleneck isn't just speed
It's context

Give coding agents better context and everything improves.

Lower cost
Faster execution
Better output

Woz is built for that shift.

A Claude Code plugin that makes coding agents faster, cheaper, and higher performing

Up to 55% cheaper
Up to 40% faster
Higher benchmark scores than Claude Code alone

And...

Your AI agent makes a mistake. Who pays for it?

Not your E&O policy
That assumes a human made the error

Not your cyber policy
That assumes an attacker breached the system

Autonomous AI agents are explicitly excluded from both

Ines Boutemadja discovered this while building AI agents for enterprises

Then procurement started asking for proof the AI was actually covered

Existing policies couldn’t provide it.

So she built Klaimee: the first purpose-build E&O coverage for AI...

AI coding tools are making developers faster than ever

QA still hasn't caught up

Aakash saw it firsthand at Windsurf during the AI coding explosion

Then realized:

QA is probably a bigger bottleneck than coding itself

So he built Canary

An AI QA engineer that reads your source code, maps changes to real user flows, spins up remote browsers, and drops video recordings directly into the PR

15 minutes instead of days

Now the workflows are getting even crazier

One customer already...

The “buy a list and blast emails” era is ending

Not because outbound stopped working

Because the data got smarter than the emails

Kathryn Wu and her co-founder built Openmart as an SMB intelligence layer:
Verified owners
Decision-maker contacts
Google reviews
Website quality
Location intelligence & more

Now they've launched "OpenClaw for Sales"

A conversational outbound workspace built on top of that data

No spreadsheet cleanup
No disconnected enrichment tools
No giant table views

Just ask the...

A drug was approved in China

Then it failed clinical trials in the US

No one could figure out why

The answer was hiding in the gut microbiome
Anto Bio’s model helped identify it

99% of the genes in your body aren't yours 
They belong to your microbiome
Over two-thirds of drugs are heavily affected by how your gut processes them

But the microbiome data was too noisy. Too messy. Petabytes of it just sitting there

Anto Bio's mission: make the gut microbiome computable for...

Most people think they need more motivation to work out

They need less friction

But training plans assume your life stays static

You travel
It rains 
You have 20 mins between meetings

People don't quit because they lack discipline

They quit because adapting the plan is harder than the workout itself

HYBRD brain can help

An adaptive AI agent that adjusts your training to whatever life throws at you

Built by ultramarathoners, Ironman finishers, and a founding engineer who won a 100-mile c...